'The Hot Wing King'

All right, tell the truth. 

Aren’t hot wings and Buffalo wings the same things?  I mean, really—they’re both made from the usually-discarded part of the bird, the part that mostly ends up in the soup pot; they’re both cooked up crisp and then covered in a spicy sauce; most people like to dip them in another sauce like blue cheese or ranch; and almost everyone who eats them, eats them in a bar or in the living room with a big game like the Super Bowl on TV.

In fact there are so many recipes for both chicken wing snacks—scores, maybe even hundreds—that it’s probably impossible to distinguish hot wings from Buffalo wings.  As far as I can determine, the main difference—if it’s even accurate—is that the basis of the hot sauce for Buffalo wings is cayenne pepper and for hot wings it’s chili peppers.

The only real difference is that Buffalo wings were invented in Buffalo, New York, and hot wings come from down south; Memphis, Tennessee, is the hot-wing capital of the country, in terms of the number of raw wings sold and cooked ones consumed, though whether they were first concocted there is arguable.

Almost inarguable is that Buffalo wings, the ones people dip in the blue cheese sauce, were introduced in 1964 in a bar.  Hot wings, the ones dipped in ranch dressing (though not always), showed up in Memphis around 1990, sold from a food truck (and 1992 in a restaurant).  An annual hot-wing festival in April began in Memphis in 2002; a Buffalo wing festival started in 2001.

But if you press the point of which town really served the first spicy chicken wings—you might well find yourself in a . . . well, heated argument, let’s say.  (If you want to argue whose wings are better . . . well, that’s probably not a real good idea.)

According to the hot-wing chef in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, though, his family recipe for the dish dates back to 1808.  Oh, and he comes from Saint Louis—though I don’t know that he wasn’t born in Memphis, where the play is set.

According to the website This Week in New York, Hall was moved to write The Hot Wing King, her third and last production of her Residency 5 at the Signature Theatre Company, in part because of that annual festival, the Southern Hot Wing Festival, in Memphis, her hometown (about which she writes frequently).  The festival includes a hot-wing cooking competition which is central to the play and initiates the events that unfold.

Hall, 38, a playwright, writer, actress, and social and political activist, was born in Memphis.  According to an interview in Art Works Blog, a website of the National Endowment for the Arts, Hall’s parents told stories around the dinner table, recounting their day at work and playing all the characters, and she credits this practice for her attraction to theater.  “It was like watching one-person shows at the kitchen table.”  As a girl, she staged plays in her family’s living room.

In 1999, she graduated from Craigmont High School in Memphis as the first African-American valedictorian.  After high school, Hall attended New York City’s Columbia University, graduating in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing.  She was awarded top departmental honors from the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). 

In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, and then spent two years as an actress in New York, working on stage and in TV.  She then entered the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program, graduating in 2009.

Hall’s been a book reviewer, journalist (another form of storytelling), and essayist for publications such as the Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and the New York Times.  She’s also been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center of Waterford, Connecticut.

She’s probably best known as the author of The Mountaintop, her play about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last night before his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968, which premièred in London in 2009 to great critical acclaim.  The Mountaintop opened on Broadway on 13 October 2011, starring Samuel L. Jackson (in his Broadway début) as King and Angela Bassett as a mysterious maid.  Directed by Kenny Leon, it ran 117 regular performances and 24 previews, closing on 22 January 2012.

Hall is also the book-writer, with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, the current juke-boxer that opened in November at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.  Other work includes Hurt Village (2012; currently in development as a feature film to be Hall’s film-directing début) and Our Lady of Kibeho (2014), Hall’s previous Residency 5 offerings at STC, and Children of Killers (2011). (Signature’s Residency 5 guarantees each playwright three productions of new plays over the course of a five-year residency.)

Hall has very strong socio-political views; race and ethnicity are often elemental to her dramaturgy.  The dramatist tries to represent the African-America community in her plays and promotes or celebrates social change. 

When, while taking an acting class at Columbia, Hall’s  teacher told the class to find plays with characters who looked like them, Hall and her scene partner, another young Southern black woman, searched the university library to no avail.  There were no plays with two black women in the cast, so Hall thought: “I have to write those plays, then.  I have to carry that baton forward and write us into existence because if I don’t who else will?"

In 2017, she was named artistic director of the Hattiloo Theater, an African-American repertory theater in Memphis dedicated to “the diversity of black expression.”  Hall said “she hopes to help bring about ‘a renaissance, a revitalization of the arts in Memphis.’”   Hall’s dedication to her city and her heritage is expressed in a comment she made at the time: “Everything that Memphis is, is represented  in my art.”

Hall’s awards include a Laurence Olivier Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award.  Hall was shortlisted for the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival.  She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Ron Brown Scholar Program, and the Coca-Cola Scholar Program. 

The world première of The Hot Wing King began performances at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, the company’s 191-seat proscenium house, on 11 February 2020; the production, directed by Hall’s collaborator, Steven H. Broadnax, III, opened on 1 March.  I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 6 March.  After one extension for the originally announced final performance on 15 March, Hot Wing King was scheduled to close on 22 March, but the coronavirus pandemic caused Signature to cease all performances after 11 March.

In the Memphis house owned by Dwayne (Korey Jackson), a successful hotel manager, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is preparing the ingredients for the town’s annual hot-wing contest.  He’s sure he has a good chance of winning the $5,000 prize this year with a new recipe, “Cajun Alfredo with Bourbon-Infused Crumbled Bacon”—especially with the help of his friends Dwayne, Isom (Sheldon Best), and Big Charles (Nicco Annan).  The four African-American men are all gay and Cordell is Dwayne’s housemate and lover.

Two months ago, the forty-ish Cordell left his wife, two sons, and job as a FedEx executive in St.  Louis to move in with Dwayne.  His wife won’t sign the divorce papers and Cordell hasn’t been able to find a job in Memphis and he feels a little like a kept man in Dwayne’s house—not that Dwayne, an eminently reasonable and thoughtful man, has said or done anything to give this impression

Cordell’s team, the New Wing Order, who gather for this occasion every year—Cordell has entered before, but never won—consists of his and Dwayne’s closest friends who treat the occasion as a special event for the four of them.  Isom, in his thirties and the youngest of the group, is an outright flamer, femmy, outrageous, and funny; when Dwayne gives the men special team shirts for the contest, Isom adds glitter to his and cuts the bottom off to reveal his midriff.  (The costumes are the work of Emilio Sosa, who seems to have had the most fun with Isom’s garb.)  During the first scene, sports-loving Big Charles keeps running back to the TV in the living room to check on a game in progress while Cordell is organizing the prep in the kitchen. 

The whole process is almost-organized chaos, and supplies the comedy for Hall’s bifurcated play: half sit-com and half family drama.  The cracks in Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship are a hint of the drama to come, and it gets a boost from the arrival of Dwayne’s former brother-in-law, TJ (Eric B. Robinson, Jr.).  TJ’s a drug-dealer and small-time crook.  He was married to Dwayne’s sister, an emotionally disturbed woman who died while under police restraint and Dwayne feels guilty because he had called the cops when she was having an episode.

TJ’s come by to leave a package of money for his son, sixteen-year-old Everett, known as “EJ” (Cecil Blutcher), who shows up himself asking to stay with his uncle.  Dwayne’s guilt over the death of EJ’s mother, which the boy witnessed, compels him to look on the boy as his responsibility; he wants his nephew to live with him and Cordell—though Cordell has misgivings about the prospect.  EJ’s also a high school basketball star and Cordell, a former Georgetown Hoya b-ball player, tries to bond with his lover’s nephew over a little one-on-one on the backyard court.

The Hot Wing King shifts between the sit-com manicness of the cooking contest, which takes place mostly in the up-left kitchen of Michael Carnahan’s open-walled set, and the melodrama of the extended-family situation, which happens in the rest of the house, including the up-right bedroom, meant to be upstairs, that EJ will occupy, and the down-left back terrace where the basketball hoop is located.  The living room, fittingly at center stage, is neutral territory where scenes from both the cooking comedy and the family drama play out.

The two parts of the play do cross over some, but TJ is pretty much exclusively involved in the family plot, though his son enters the cooking comedy near the end of the play when Dwayne makes him an honorary member of the New Wing Order.  Big Charles and Isom stick mostly to the cooking scenario—Isom takes an action that effects the outcome of the competition, but I won’t reveal it now (though Hall telegraphs it long before its repercussions are seen); only Dwayne and Cordell are really part of both elements of The Hot Wing King. 

This isn’t the kind of play in which any real disaster occurs; the most dramatic thing to happen to Dwayne’s circle is the result of the hot-wing contest (which I also won’t reveal).  In the end, everyone is accommodated, even the criminally-inclined TJ.  What Hall’s writing about isn’t the hot-wing contest or the conflict among Dwayne, TJ, and EJ; the play’s also not about the potential conflict between Dwayne and Cordell (who never actually brings up his concerns to Dwayne). 

In addition to the Memphis hot-wing festival, Hall also drew inspiration for The Hot Wing King from the relationship of her brother and his lover, but the play isn’t really about gay men, black men, or gay black men; neither gayness nor race is an issue: the first is only mentioned a few times more or less in passing and the second not at all.  The Hot Wing King’s about how these guys, who are mostly unrelated to one another, make a family. 

I can’t tell you much detail, at least not cogently, about Katori Hall’s Hot Wing King.  The production, which ran two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission, was well done, and the acting was fine . . . but I couldn’t understand about two-thirds of what anyone was saying!

The problem I had—and I really hate to put this into words—is that they spoke in Southern black colloquialisms, like code.  One reviewer called it “the vibrant dialect of black Memphis,” and, from their laughter, it seemed most of the rest of the audience got the idiom.

It wasn’t a serious drawback for me when two of the men were just talking—then I could understand them fine.  (These scenes had another problem, though it wasn’t about comprehension, but believability.)  When the guys are all together and runnin’ off at the mouth, which they do a lot, it was just all gobbledygook to me.  I couldn’t even distinguish individual words—or even individual speakers!  

I can tell what Hall’s main theme for the play is; that really comes out in the quieter one-on-one scenes.  It’s not a bad point—but I had to sit through all the incomprehensible scenes of code-talk while Hall and her characters make it. 

As I said, however, Broadnax’s production was fine aside from this problem—which, I suppose, was at least partly my failing for not knowing the characters’ vernacular.  (I wasn’t the only spectator with this difficulty.  Michael Sommers of New York Stage Review remarked, “Frankly, some of the deeply Southern-fried lingo escaped my old Eastern Seaboard ears . . . .”)  Perhaps the director could have found a way to accommodate the old, white Northerners like me without sacrificing the veracity—or verisimilitude is maybe a more accurate word—of the characters and milieu, but I’m not convinced he could have. 

I would never say, though, that the actors were anything less than convincing either in their characterizations of the six Memphians or in their use of the local argot.  The cast as a whole, especially the four New Wing Order members, formed a true mini-community, a club to which they all belonged.  Another word for this might be . . . family.

The only times that this sense of closeness and familiarity is strained is when the play waxes serious.  In those moments, Hall wrote the characters dialogue that’s hyper poetic and lofty—the polar opposite of the local patois.  The tonal shift doesn’t quite work smoothly, and as much as the actors worked to make the sober scenes sound like conversation, the dialogue kept coming out as epigraphs. 

(In his New York Times review of Hall’s play, Ben Brantley, who had a complaint similar to mine, quotes one example of this shift in diction.  This is Cordell speaking to Dwayne: “I see why you steady [sic] treat me like a child.  I am.  It’s like I’ve just been pushed out of the womb and I’m getting hit with the cold and the air and the lights and the truth.”)

As in any good ensemble play, all the actors performed at the same level of excellence.  Even in the scenes which I had a hard time understanding, I had no difficulty feeling that the actors understood one another completely, playing off (and with) one another like the close and fond friends they were supposed to be.  The quality of the cast and the work of Broadnax was not in doubt.

Singling out a few for the significance of their roles, either for their function in the plot or the character challenge Hall gave them, I compliment Korey Jackson for making Dwayne the levelheaded stalwart he is.  Jackson makes him unquestionably the pater of this ad hoc familias, keeping everyone on an even keel.  The actor keeps Dwayne outwardly on control, even as he lets us see the turmoil he’s feeling inside.

As his partner, Cordell, Toussaint Jeanlouis conveys his seriousness about making his hot wings, no matter how lightly anyone else may take the task.  He can seem as even-tempered as Dwayne, but he’s far more fragile, and Toussaint lets this out at times then hides it away at others.  As Isom, the most flamboyant character in The Hot Wing King, Sheldon Best plays the hell out of his character; it’s hard to tell who’s having more fun, Best or Isom.  He literally light ups the stage and makes the most of Sosa’s costumes.

Best is also one of the two darlings of reviewers in Broadnax’s production.  The other is Cecil Blutcher, making his Off-Broadway début as the young EJ.  Now, Blutcher is considerably older than EJ, and the extra maturity and self-control shows in the way the actor conveys EJ’s confusion and hurt over the death of his mother and his father’s less-than conscientious parenting and his own wish to go down a different path than TJ.  In Blutcher’s hands, EJ’s outbursts and recriminations still indicate an underlying yearning and even goodness.  The actor’s delivery of a horrifying speech describing his mother’s shooting reveals a lot about EJ and his troubled demeanor.

I’ve already described Michael Carnahan’s set, which comprised four playing areas (in descending order of activity: kitchen, living room, back yard patio, and upstairs bedroom).  One reviewer, Marilyn Stasio of Variety, thought the concept was superfluous, but I (like most of the published reviewers) found it well used and practical in terms of an acting environment, not to mention a fine visual representation of Dwayne’s comfortable, un-showy, middle-class lifestyle.  (The kitchen incidentally, is practical and the men actually cook the sauce on stage—so the Griffin is filled with the aroma of cooking hot-wing sauce.)

Sosa’s costumes did the same thing for the characters: display each one’s personality and way of presenting themselves to the world in an unobtrusive (well, except for Isom’s flashy dress) way.  Alan C. Edwards’s lighting nicely isolates or integrates the different playing areas as needed while still allowing us to be aware that this is a home, not a series of rooms.  (Carnahan’s open walls go a long way to establishing this from preset; though we know there are “walls” there, no room is unconnected from any other.)

I’ve collected a dozen reviews of The Hot Wing King to survey.  Brantley in the Times acknowledged that the play “has its problems” but continued that “this likable but lumpy production . . . is never better than when its all-male ensemble is functioning as an awkward but interdependent unit.”  The characters “have that palpable, physical ease with one another, both contented and irritable, that comes from being part of a family.”  Hall, Brantley contended, “is asking what constitutes a family in a world of fragmentation.”  He added that the core characters are gay “allows Hall to challenge conventional definitions of manhood and fatherhood in black America,” using “the bright, peppy context of a classical sitcom structure to do so.” 

“The balance between social soap opera and buoyant comedy isn’t always gracefully sustained,” reported the Timesman, further noting, “Nor is the script able to comfortably fold its more somber subplots into the running, frantic story of the cooking contest.”  Furthermore, Brantley found, “When characters . . . talk about their deeper feelings, they tend to shift into improbably poetic flights of diction.” 

“What’s refreshing here is the matter-of-fact depiction of black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality,” asserted the Times reviewer. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout, quipping that “Katori Hall’s plays remind me of a sign I once saw over the front door of an unpretentious little restaurant: ‘NOT FANCY, BUT GOOD,’” observed that “there's nothing fancy about the down-to-earth dramaturgy of Ms. Hall's kitchen-sink chronicles of family life in all its varied aspects.” 

All she does—if “all” is the word—is tell stories about ordinary men and women who, as Jack Webb said of the characters in “Dragnet,” sound “as real as a guy pouring a cup of coffee.”  Yet truth gushes out every time they open their mouths, and before you know it, you’re caught up in their lives and fates.

Teachout dubbed Hall “one of the best playwrights we have,” and labeled The Hot Wing King “her finest play yet.”  After describing the situations in Hall’s script, the WSJ review-writer explained that “while ‘The Hot Wing King’ starts off playing the resulting complications for belly laughs, they end up being deeply, darkly serious.” 

Variety’s Stasio warned would-be theatergoers, “Good luck trying to follow the meandering plot of ‘The Hot Wing King,’” which she labels a “good-natured kitchen comedy.”  Stasio asserted, “Director Steve H. Broadnax III gets the best results when he keeps everybody and his uncle squished into the narrow kitchen.” 

The Variety reviewer continued, “Those crowd scenes work so well, you wonder why Hall . . . and her design team even bothered with the superfluous settings of a living room and an upstairs bedroom.  It certainly wasn’t demanded by the loose-limbed plot,” Stasio felt.  “Although it presents itself as a gay sitcom, the ‘sit’ isn’t sturdy enough to sustain the ‘com,’ which actually comes from the extremely likable characters.”

On TheaterScene.com, Julia Polinsky declared, “The play pushes all kinds of buttons and does it well.  Humor, anger, resentment, ambition, family, love, commitment: it’s all there, alternating between hilarious and searing.”  Polinsky reported that Hall “has written The Hot Wing King in a rapid-fire, delicious-sounding vernacular, which helps the play feel completely natural.”  The playwright “knows how to make you care as deeply about these men as Cordell cares about his wings,” felt the review-writer.  “Which is particularly interesting, because the basic story is pretty well-worn.”  Polinsky made some pertinent observations:

Lacking the milieu of gay African-American men, The Hot Wing King could be almost tedious—yawn, again?  The wayward teenage son looking for redemption?  The couple that’s uncomfortable with one person’s sacrifice and the other’s controlling behavior?  The friends, one warmhearted and wise, the other giddy and silly?  Sorry, but what’s new?  Been there, done that; let’s move on.  But Hall’s vivid characterizations and superb language, coupled with outstanding performances and terrific direction from Steve H. Broadnax III, makes The Hot Wing King feel fresh and new.  Not to mention, the knockout scenic design . . . and costumes that effortlessly create character . . . make it all work.  Really well.  Really, really well.

The reviewer concluded with the admonition: “Those tears in your eyes at The Hot Wing King?  They might be from the heat of some Suicide Flats, or from the heart of this tale of ambition, love, family, and Pili-Pili powder.” 

Labeling The Hot Wing King a “delectable new play,” James Wilson on Talkin’ Broadway remarked: “It is not uncommon for a theater production to appeal to the visual and aural senses, but it is rare that a show gets people talking about the enticing smells.”  Wilson quickly added, “To its credit, The Hot Wing King has abundant pleasures beyond its attention to aromatic detail.  Hall,” he reported, “artfully mixes a heaping dose of comedy, a dollop of sentimentality, and a dash of social commentary to create a rich and satisfying theater experience.” 

The TB reviewer lamented that the play “sometimes drifts into broad and formulaic situation-comedy mode, but the actors skillfully inject the characters . . . with complex humanity.”  He caviled a bit that, “[r]unning nearly two and a half hours, the play arrives a little overdone,” backing off, however, because “[t]here are a lot of laughs.”  Compared to other recent black-themed plays, Wilson asserted, “Hall’s The Hot Wing King does not push the boundaries of theatrical form and style in ways that other shows have, but it is certainly a viable contender.”  He concluded, “In its unabashed treatment of sexuality, masculinity and race, it is a play to be applauded and savored.”

On TheaterScene.net (not affiliated with the above-cited TheaterScene.com), Darryl Reilly labeled Hall’s play “uplifting” and said it’s “where comedy and drama deftly converge.”  He proclaimed it a “rewarding contemporary work.”  The reviewer praised “Hall’s gorgeous dialogue” as “a compendium of punchy lingo, colloquialisms and everyday realism,” and found, “Her command of structure is impeccable as the events unfold with force, suspense and insight.” 

Reilly labeled Broadnax’s staging “sharp,” Carnahan’s set design “artful,” Edwards’s lighting “adroit,” sound designers Luqman Brown and Robert Kaplowitz’s effects “sparkling,” and Sosa’s costumes “stylish.”  In conclusion, he affirmed, “The Hot Wing King’s accomplished depth continues to substantiate Hall’s preeminence as a leading playwright.”

The Hot Wing King “is a moderately heartwarming, sometimes amusing, occasionally clichéd dramedy with sitcom overtones,” declared Samuel L. Leiter on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “Performed under Steve H. Broadnax III’s buoyant direction, with raucous energy,” Leiter complained, “Balancing sitcom business and darker issues is a precarious endeavor that the play doesn’t always master.”  The “jokes and bickering” that dominate the first part of the play until “[e]ventually, more serious personal matters intrude” forces “a tonal shift.” 

The work of the design team, Leiter wrote, “go far to making The Hot Wing King tasty, although not quite enough to sustain a two hour and 20 minute meal.”  The actors “definitely make The Hot Wing King a sweet-tasting, if not particularly hot, concoction that many will enjoy,” but Leiter, like me, warned that “many listeners . . . will find themselves depending more on the expressive acting than the words spoken to follow along closely.” 

Zachary Stewart characterized The Hot Wing King as “a sensitive portrait of black masculinity, and the tension that can arise between fathers and sons when they don't see eye-to-eye,” on TheaterMania.  “The linguistic richness of The Hot Wing King makes it particularly delicious to hear,” affirmed Stewart. 

Through clever wordplay, shameless vowel substitution, and ’90s pop music references, these men have developed a vernacular that feels central to their identities as individuals and cohesion as a community. 

“Steve H. Broadnax III has directed a snappy production that seamlessly slides back and forth over the border between comedy and drama,” reported the TM reviewer.  Stewart praised Carnahan’s set, but he declared Sosa’s costumes “brilliant.”  The reviewer’s final comment was: “But as both a comedy and a drama, The Hot Wing King is quite filling, and will leave you with a satisfying aftertaste days later.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Stanford Friedman called Hall’s play “a tasty new work” that “comes in three flavors.” 

As directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, it is a classic buddy comedy with friends and lovers involved in bouts of physical tomfoolery and good-natured ribbing.  It is also a honey-glazed drama seasoned with uncertainty and dipped in guilt.  And it is a hot take on sons and fathers, biological and otherwise, in black America . . . .

“Saucy.  Spicy.  One hardly needs to be an experienced theater critic for these adjectives to pop into one’s head during the prolonged opening section of Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King.”  So asserted Brian Scott Lipton at the top of his Theater Pizzazz review—and then added, “The other word that popped into my critical head, however, was ‘surprising.’” 

Hall . . . is usually a writer of substance, so I didn’t expect her to simply pen an extended sitcom.  And Hall doesn’t disappoint.  The play suddenly makes a sharp tonal turn, and while the laughs don’t completely disappear, much of the next two hours is devoted to a dramatic and stunningly realistic exploration of several different kinds of male relationships.

The TP review-writer concluded: “Like a good hot wing, the play ends up having not just fire, but remarkable depth and flavor, all of which is brought out to perfection by an incredibly talented cast under Steve H. Broadnax III’s assured direction.”

Melissa Rose Bernardo, in the first of two notices for New York Stage Review, revealed, “It sounds hard to believe given the title, but The Hot Wing King is, at its core, not really a play about hot wings.”  Bernardo explained that “the wing-ding is really just a pretext . . . to bring together this group of men.”  The source of the drama?  Bernardo affirmed that “there’s no recipe, and there are no step-by-step instructions, for Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship.  Like the rest of us, they’ll just have to wing it.”

In NYSR review number two, Michael Sommers labeled the play “[f]requently a laugh out loud new comedy,” then explained, “On its occasionally serious side, the good-natured play considers a couple of issues that probably confront many an adult male relationship today.”  Sommers pronounced the première “smart and sassy” and called Hall “ever-astonishing.”  The second NYSR reviewer pointed out that Hall “develops the likable story” by “cunningly entwin[ing] thoughtful matters with some fairly broad comedy.” 

“A playful though ultimately sincere dramedy with an upbeat viewpoint, dynamic characters, and a happy ending,” reported Sommers, “The Hot Wing King is agreeably performed by a company of tiptop actors who appear highly natural and easy in their intimate interactions.”  The review-writer praised Sosa’s costumes and found that Broadnax “has done quite a capable job in guiding his company through the play’s changing emotional subtleties.”  He concluded that the play, which he found “sweet” and “relatively easygoing,” “delivers a worthy American story for today that is composed, produced, and performed with considerable intelligence and charm.”

*  *  *  *

DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, THE HOT WING KING  ENDED ITS RUN AT THE SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY ON 11 MARCH 2020

'Memphis' (National Tour, Washington, D.C.)

It’s probably no surprise to anyone who reads ROT even occasionally that I’m old enough to remember the early days of rock ’n’ roll. I was growing up in Washington when the wave hit, and in my memory it struck suddenly and just took over the AM radio dial. I woke up for school to “Rock Around the Clock” and “Blue Suede Shoes” on my clock radio, and came home to turn the radio on again to hear “Chantilly Lace” or “Blue Moon.” I’d painted a little green dot on the dial of my transistor radio (the linear ancestor of the iPod, in a manner of thinking) to mark where I could find WEAM (“The WEAM Team,” at 1390 on the AM dial), the AM station to which my friends and I all listened, so I could always find it instantly. I’d turn on the TV to watch American Bandstand every afternoon; one of my friends even got to be on the show. In the latter part of the decade, my dad bought a part interest in a Top 40 station in Little Rock (KGHI, which became KAJI to conform with its local pronunciation, broadcasting at 1250) and even listened to our hometown rock ’n’ roll stations in the car to hear what was going on in the field. He’d also go out to Little Rock and come home with the dupes from the station, so I had the best collection of R ’n’ R 45’s in my class (or probably anywhere else in D.C.). If a song was on a play list, I had it! I was 11 and 12 by this time, and my dance parties were the best in my middle school! I even loaned many of my 45’s to the school for the sock hops (remember those?) we had in the gym in those days. I was totally caught up in the rock ’n’ roll tide, as were almost all my friends and schoolmates.

Of course, I never witnessed the actual birth pangs of the new music, I just experienced the baby in its infancy. I know now, though, how the music of my pre-teen and teen years came to be, and I happened to be living in Europe when the Beatles came along and changed it all. (I was a huge Beatles fan from the moment I heard their first releases through the end of college, when the Fab Four broke up.) Watching the musical Memphis, the 2010 Tony-winner for best musical, best book (Joe DiPietro), best score (David Bryan and DiPietro), and best orchestrations (Daryl Waters and Bryan), plus a passel of other nominations and Drama Desk Awards, in its Washington stop on the National Tour, an awful lot of my musical childhood came back to me in a rush. It’s a tad hard to separate the personal nostalgia from the current musical-theater experience, but I’ll give it a try. 

I was particularly caught up emotionally when the play presented singers or groups that are supposed to be recording artists of the time (as opposed to the songs that are about the play’s plot and characters). I heard echoes of Little Richard and Chubby Checker and, I think, Diana Ross (who really came along a little later, so my ear may have been miscalibrated). I don’t know if composer Bryan, a founding member of Bon Jovi, intended to create those echoes or if I just heard them on my own because the play’s environment evoked the era and the milieu for me. (It may be partly because the opening set piece is a giant AM radio dial, a motif often repeated throughout the production. It made me go back immediately to my middle school days, listening to rock ’n’ roll on the radio. We really did walk around sometimes with portable radios squeezed up against our ears. No ear buds yet in the mid-’50s!)

That’s all sort of what Memphis was about for me when my mother and I took in the Saturday matinee performance in the Opera House of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on 23 June. It was the first chance I had to see the play since it opened on Broadway in 2009. (Readers of ROT will recall that my friend and frequent guest-blogger, Kirk Woodward, wrote about being a small investor in Memphis in “Broadway Angel” on 7 September 2010.) Even though the tour had just landed here from Buffalo, it was already substantially sold out and my near-last-minute plan to come to D.C. at the end of the month meant we were way up in the balcony, but I can tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, both theatrical and personal. The Washington performances began on 12 June and ran through 1 July before moving on to Las Vegas, San Diego, and L.A. following the Kennedy Center stop.

After workshopping and trying out in a number of venues around the country (early stagings were at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts, and TheatreWorks in Mountainview, California, both in 2003-04; the La Jolla Playhouse in southern California where director Christopher Ashley is artistic director, in 2008; and Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater in 2009), Memphis landed at the Shubert Theatre on 23 September 2009 for previews, opening to the press on 19 October. The show has announced its closing for 5 August 2012, mounting up a total of 30 previews and 1,166 regular performances. The critical reception was mixed and, according to the reports, the play never really caught fire with audiences. Still, a run of nearly three years and over 1,000 performances is more than respectable and, were it not for the present-day economics of Broadway, it would have been a box-office hit. (Kirk tells me he’s only about 5% short of recouping his full Memphis investment, which suggests that the whole show’s in a similar state. That, too, is respectable these days. Apparently the current National Tour will not benefit the original production’s bottom line, though the contributions of college and amateur productions are uncertain, and I also don’t know about European and other foreign productions—of which I’m sure there will several because of Memphis’s quintessentially American story and sound.)

The plot of Memphis, suggested by late Broadway producer and screenwriter George W. George, is really two stories, one folded inside the other. (Which of the two is the envelope and which is the filling depends entirely on your perspective and your sentiments. I’ll give my impression and you can extrapolate yours.) To set the scene, the city of Memphis, Tennessee, is to blues and rhythm-and-blues what New Orleans is to jazz and Nashville is to country: it’s the sipapu, the place of emergence, the sacred center. (Okay, I’m overstating a little. But, if you’re a devotee, only a little.) Beale Street is where the true lovers and makers of blues music and its cousin, rhythm-and-blues live, where the purest, realest, and sweetest is. (There was a 2010-2011 cable TV cop series starring Jason Lee, Memphis Beat, which, while not especially outstanding as drama, had the coolest score on television—all current covers or original recordings of blues, R&B, and early rock.) Like jazz, though, this was the music of African Americans, and in the Jim Crow 1950s, that made it both suspect and dangerous to white people. “Race music,” it was called derisively—and ominously. It wasn’t just that it was the music of black people, but if white folks listened to it, it could make them crazy and do evil things. It was dangerous. And out of this dangerous devil music came rock ’n’ roll—essentially when white singers (think Elvis Presley, who used to go to black churches to hear the choirs) began to sing “black” music for white audiences. Memphis depicts the route by which this new sound came out of the Beale Street clubs, almost exclusively owned, run, and patronized by African Americans, invaded the radio waves of the city, forced its way into the record racks of music stores—almost entirely against the will and determination of the middle-aged, middle-class white businessmen who owned them. Why? Because (white) DJ’s like Dewey Phillips, who was an inspiration for the character Huey Calhoun in the musical, began playing the new songs on the radio and the city’s (and then the nation’s) teenagers took to it like a starving man grabs a ham sandwich. These kids took the new music for their own—it was the first real nationwide youth movement at a time when America was inventing the teenager—and demanded record store-owners sell it in their shops and other radio stations play it on their programs, and finally TV channels put it on shows like Bandstand (which soon became American Bandstand on a national sound stage—a phenomenon that’s fictionalized in Memphis) and its clones and copies. This all happened often against the determinations, sometimes virulent, of the white establishment in the schools, churches, town halls, and homes—and it started in Memphis. This history is laid out in Memphis in a softer version than it really was—the racism and violence is shown but soft-pedaled and sanitized—as Huey (Bryan Fenkart), basically a flop at everything he tries (he’s a high school dropout who, he says, can’t even spell ‘TV’) surreptitiously introduces the new sound in the record department of his uncle’s department store and then moves on to take over the airwaves by presenting the music in defiance of his boss’s orders.

(In the scene where Huey hijacks the sound booth at a radio station when the regular DJ, who played crooners like Perry Como, takes a break, the upstart locks himself in the booth and barricades it against the owner, the DJ, and the janitor. Back when my father owned part of KAJI, a year or two after the start of the play, and the station was shifting from easy listening to Top 40 rock, one DJ announced on the air that he’d taken over the station, padlocked the doors, and would be playing the same song over and over. It was a stunt, of course, but no one outside knew that—the station management got into a little trouble because the police were called—and I was reminded of this episode while that scene played out. The song the DJ played, by the way, was a specialty recording called “Chinese Bandits” which was a tribute to a defensive squad on the 1958 LSU football team. The gag song became a regional number-one hit for a short time as a result of the stunt.)

Within this music history-lite is a simple love story—complicated by the fact that it’s interracial in segregated Memphis. Nearly alone among white Memphians in his attraction to the black music, Huey goes into Delray’s, an underground blues club on Beale Street where the singer is Felicia Farrell, Delray’s beautiful sister. At first, Huey goes for the music, but he’s increasingly drawn to Felicia (Felicia Boswell) and, in the face of disapproval from all quarters, including his own mother and Felicia’s club-owner brother, sets out to break through her resistance. Of course, he wins her over and Mama Calhoun (Julie Johnson) and Delray (Quentin Earl Darrington) reluctantly drop their opposition. Huey makes Felicia a local star but faces hostility from white folks who see his music and his crossing of the racial lines as a threat. He nevertheless becomes the most popular DJ in town because of his young, white fans, launching a Bandstand-like television music show. He’s courted by the TV producer of a proposed national dance show—“Richard” Clark is the competition for the gig—but when Huey’s offered the job, the New York TV man explains that his show’s dancers, who are all black, will have to be replaced with white performers and he will have to keep his relationship with Felicia, to whom he’s now engaged, on the DL. In true musical-theater form, Huey decides that he belongs in Memphis because Memphis is in him, and he chooses not to go to New York and change his life to suit some . . . well, suits. (And that’s how Dick Clark got to be the World’s Oldest Teenager!)

In both parts of the plot, it’s Huey’s sincerity and commitment that drives the outcome. No one wants him to play that race music, but he does and the kids love it. Delray and the denizens of his club don’t understand why a white kid would cross over to Beale Street to hear their music, but he shows them he truly loves the sound and gets it, so they grudgingly let him hang around. When he promises to get them and their music on the air, they don’t believe him, but when he succeeds, they all latch on to his rising star and embrace his TV show. He even sort of wins over the white record-sellers and station-owners: they resist playing the black music in their stores and on their airwaves, but when the kids start buying up the records and boosting the sales of the sponsors’ merchandise, they avidly go along for the commercial benefit. Delray and Mama Calhoun don’t want Huey to date Felicia—more because it might be hazardous to one or both of them, not so much because they’re separatists: it’s one of the soft-pedaling aspects I mentioned—but he proves his love and they reluctantly back off. So when the DJ forgoes the move to New York City when he learns it means abandoning the people who make the music he loves, we get the impression it’s not because he’s a small-town guy who can’t hack the big-city scene, the bumbler who failed at everything until the music got him: it’s because he’s sincere about not selling out.

If all this sounds a little simplistic, a little too easy, it is. It’s essentially a feel-good story that leaves out all the tension of the real circumstances. (There’s little more than a passing mention, for instance, of the fact that interracial marriages were illegal in most of the South until 1967 when the Supreme Court overturned all the existing anti-miscegenation laws. If Felicia and Huey go to New York, they can be legally married even if they have to keep the marriage quiet; in Memphis, they can’t be married or even live together openly. This gets very little play.) Huey faces one beating by a gang of thugs on the street. In the real world, of course, neither he nor Felicia would be likely to get off so lightly. (The lynching of Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman, happened in 1955.) And even in the face of increased sales, I don’t think the establishment businessmen of Memphis would be so ready to put black music and black performers up front this way; I can’t imagine that a Memphis TV station would have ever aired a show with black dancers in the ’50s. It’s a fantasy: Dick Clark shocked America when he integrated the participants on American Bandstand around 1964 after starting out with all white kids on his show. (Black artists could appear, but black kids and white kids couldn’t dance together on national TV.)

Bryan and DiPietro’s music is nice enough, without any truly outstanding number, but I find that in shows about music the way Memphis is that there are two kinds of songs. (I’m not referring here to the distinction between character-based songs and lyrical songs which my friend Kirk Woodward drew in his articles on “Theatrical and Popular Songs,” on ROT on 2 October 2011, and “The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October 2011. As a theater score, all the songs in Memphis are essentially character- or situation-based.) There are what I’ll call “story songs,” which help propel the play’s narrative one way or another, and “performance songs,” which are the songs written to evoke (though sometimes parody) singers and musicians in some kind of presentation—in the case of Memphis, usually a cabaret appearance or a recording. In Memphis, the performance songs are meant to approximate the R&B and rock ’n’ roll songs Huey's promoting (or the white-bread music he's trying to overshadow, such as the amusing “Whitey White and the White-Tones’ ‘Whiter Than You.’”). It may have been my own focus, the same reason that I see the love story as an adjunct of the rock ’n’ roll story rather than the reverse, but I liked the performance songs much better than the story songs. That’s not entirely cut-and-dried. Two story songs stood out for the same reasons that I found the performance songs more compelling—they’re more musically interesting and they each have a different dynamic while the other story songs all seem alike (or at least very similar). Both are by Huey: “The Music of My Soul” is the song in which he demonstrates that the R&B the Delray musicians perform speaks to him, too, the song that makes Delray, Felicia, and the Beale Street club-goers accept him as at least a musical soul mate. That song comes early in the first scene; late in the play, Huey explains why he won’t be going to New York City to win fame and wealth in “Memphis Lives in Me.” Both are big production numbers, but the thing that got me is that they both have real character and personality. (It may be no coincidence, then, that “Memphis Lives” is the principal soundtrack for the show’s TV ads. It’s the musical expression of the play’s theme.)

Christopher Ashley directs the production, which runs 2½ hours with one intermission, with a lot of action—or maybe I should call it motion. Under Ashley’s “efficient” direction, the Washington Post’s Nelson Pressley wrote, “‘Memphis’ never rests.” Everyone’s moving almost all the time and with 21 musical numbers, there’s a great deal of energetic dancing choreographed by Sergio Trujillo. I didn’t find much of the choreography distinguished, just active. The cast, however, executes Trujillo’s uninspired steps with immense verve and skill. (In the Washingtonian, Missy Frederick criticized Trujillo’s dances as not being “natural or spontaneous,” and I think that’s accurate. Still, it’s a far cry from the Broadway première of Footloose in 1998 which was a show about dancing with almost none at all on stage!) On reflection after the show, I wonder if all that movement wasn’t Ashley’s cover for the lack of emotional substance. If everyone’s moving a lot, maybe we won’t notice that no one’s getting really involved beyond lip service. The story often comes right up to the edge of an emotional or psychological precipice—musical, racial, social, political—but it never really jumps off. The New York Times’s Charles Isherwood, in his review of the Broadway première, compared the show to “a cover version of a song you’ve heard done better before,” suggesting that not only have we heard the melody and lyrics before, but this version is less sharp, less surprising, less thrilling than the earlier one. Some of the problem might be in the acting (I began to wonder how different the Broadway actors had been in these roles), but I think it was in the script and the direction. As I said, DiPietro’s book takes each potentially fraught element, from the racial tension to the radical musical shift and the social implications that brought, one notch or two back from a high point. DiPietro seems to have opted for a family version of the times, unlike, say, West Side Story, set in another part of the country at about the same time. (When my dad was with USIA in Germany, the agency responsible for cultural propaganda, the U.S. government wouldn’t sponsor official tours of WSS because it showed our society in a violent and unflattering way. My guess is that Memphis would have passed muster easily.) No one really hates in this show—and we know they really could—and no one ever faces real danger. Huey gets beat up, but he recovers fast, suffers no repercussions, and the incident evaporates from the narrative immediately. It’s a textual set piece.

Huey’s almost too silly to be a serious threat or to serve as a hero. (This is where I first began to wonder if Chad Kimball handled the part any more forcefully than Fenkart.) Fenkart, who understudied the part in New York, behaves like a buffoon, not just an incompetent failure. When his Huey walks into Delray’s, after having stood outside listening to the music, he seems surprised that the club-goers look on with suspicion—as if crossing into the black district were a natural act. He approaches Felicia without any indication he knows this is unacceptable behavior and potentially dangerous. In fact, while it might be clear why Huey’d be attracted to Felicia, it’s not at all evident why she’d be remotely interested in him. His record shop and radio patter is supposed to be charming and disarming, but it comes off more as slightly moronic, like the caricature of a DJ of early rock. Even though all the performances are pitched in that direction, giving me the impression that that’s how Ashley directed the show from the start, Fenkart’s Huey seems to be taking it further and it gets hard to believe that anyone, the teens, the businessmen, or Felicia, would take to him.

There isn’t a lot of chemistry between Fenkart’s Huey and Boswell’s Felicia except that the script says there is. On stage, Huey and Felicia seem to get together because the story needs them to, not because the characters are drawn to each other. Boswell, who played Felicia on Broadway after January 2011, performs the character’s songs well, with a dark, husky voice that works very well in bluesy numbers, but doesn’t present much of a personality in the dialogue scenes. When the singer agrees to see Huey romantically, supposedly a momentous choice that goes against every social taboo and her own reservations, there’s no cataclysm, or even a fraught moment. Boswell’s low-key stage persona is more in line with the rest of the company than is Fenkart’s, but since she’s at the emotional center of the drama, it seems less comprehensible.

I’ve already mentioned the way the script downplays the final acquiescence of Mama and Delray to Huey’s suit of Felicia and the ease with which the businessmen of Memphis drop their opposition to Huey’s playing of race music. That’s all in the script, of course, but none of the actors gives any sense that these are momentous decisions. That’s obviously a directorial choice as much as an acting one since it’s universal, but it makes all the characters less real and believable outside a musical-theater world. Remember that this is the time not only of the Emmett Till lynching, but of Brown v. Board of Education and the Little Rock school desegregation conflict. On the music scene alone, this is when Elvis went on The Ed Sullivan Show and the cameras wouldn’t show him below the waist. But none of that’s part of the Memphis universe, and the characters never acknowledge it.

The actors of the ensemble all execute their parts firmly, though only one breaks out and makes a notable character of what DiPietro wrote. I presume that this is because Ashley kept them all in check or none of them was inspired to go beyond the demands of the part. The standout among the ensemble is Julie Johnson, who mostly plays Mama Calhoun. (She also covers another small role.) As a character, Mama’s dispensable except for one scene. After Huey’s been offered the gig in New York and plans to take Felicia and marry her, she buys into his commitment and enthusiasm and goes on to help convince Delray and his friends with the gospel- and country-infused “Change Don’t Come Easy.” The showstopper is supposed to be “Memphis Lives in Me,” I think, but Johnson kills in her big number: she’s Mama Rose with a soft heart and a little Southern soul, belting like Merman. Mama’s sole reason for being is to do that number, and Johnson nails it. Theatrically, it’s the best moment on the stage.

Physically, the production is top-notch. Paul Tazewell’s costumes are all wonderfully evocative of the time and place (though, in keeping with his other characteristics, Huey is dressed a little like a vaudeville geek) and his dresses for Boswell’s Felicia are downright gorgeous. The two-level sets designed by David Gallo along with his and Shawn Sagady’s projections, atmospherically lit by Howell Binkley, depict the story’s locales and atmosphere nicely and shifted swiftly to allow the fast-moving performance to flow seamlessly and cinematically. Alvin Hough, Jr.’s Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra replicated the sounds of ’50s blues, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll distinctively, albeit in an appropriately theatricalized form. Along with that oft-repeated motif of the radio dial, the orchestration is perhaps the production element that most propelled me back to my childhood days of listening to these sounds in my bedroom.

Despite the heartening note that Memphis is a relative rarity on Broadway these days: an original musical play that’s neither a retreaded movie or a pastiche of tunes from some artist’s songbook—for which it merits tremendous praise and gratitude—I gather I’m not alone in my criticisms. Charles Isherwood said in his New York Times review of the première, “This slick but formulaic entertainment . . . barely generates enough heat to warp a vinyl record,” and I recall that most New York outlets more or less agreed. Still, the production won the best-musical Tony over Fela!, a much more ambitious theater piece about the Afrobeat performer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. (Fela!, also out on a National Tour, will be making a return to Broadway from 9 July until 4 August.)

Of the D.C. presentation, Nelson Pressley declared in the Washington Post that Memphis “doesn’t do much with the ancient terrain of whites getting hip to black music as rock and roll is born.” Noted Pressley, “It hurts the show that the actual love story feels half-baked.” Calling the play a “gawky musical tale,” Jolene Munch Cardoza of the Washington Examiner lamented, “The whole affair could be infinitely more engaging if it didn't feel so contrived and superficial with its one-dimensional characters and cardboard scenery,” pronouncing Memphis “sweet but not soulful.” Washington City Paper’s Rebecca J. Ritzel thought Memphis was “good—just not great,” and wondered how the play won its Tonys. Her answer was that “there are only so many American Theatre Wing voters who like punk rock and Afrobeat. Or, put another way, American Idiot and Fela! split the liberal vote. Memphis, with its original bluesy pop showtunes, was the conservative show left standing.” Still, Ritzel decided, the musical “does manage to break the musical mold in subtler ways” than its Tony competition did.

In a more positive assessment, Doug Rule said, “Memphis the musical tends to surprise people” and, in a backhanded compliment in Metro Weekly, he advised readers to “take a chance on the show, and you'll likely walk away with an appreciation for the way in which Joe DiPietro tells a shopworn tale.” In Washingtonian magazine, Missy Frederick called the plot “fairly conventional” but praised the music as “bluesy and warm.” Overall, Frederick affirmed, Memphis offers “many of the traditional pleasures of the old-fashioned musical.”

Among the blog reviewers, Joel Markowitz saw the show on Broadway before the tour and, declaring, “It’s infectious!” on DC Metro Theater Arts, he proclaimed that “it’s love at first sight all over again!” On the Maryland Theatre Guide, Jennifer Perry wrote that although “Joe DiPietro’s book is hardly revolutionary,” Memphis is “something that should definitely be seen” and the touring production is “not to be missed,” pronounced Blogcritics’ Michelle Alexandria. Observing that “Memphis has an intentional retro feel to it, which is perfect for this distinctly period piece,” Terry Ponick of DC Theatre Scene dubbed it “an odd show in many respects.” “It’s lively, fast-paced, crisp, and professional in every way,” she continued. “But it boasts the flimsiest of plots and character development.” Ponick, however, caught my own response pretty well, concluding that “particularly for audience members who lived through this era, this production, directed by Christopher Ashley, hits all the right nostalgic musical notes.”

In the end, that was the key to this show, at least for me. Despite all my quibbles and caveats—and I believe they’re serious deficiencies from a theatrical perspective—the way Memphis transported me back to the time and place (well, the time: I’ve never been to Memphis) made it a more-than-satisfying theater experience. I didn’t come out singing the score as I used to in the (really) old days (see my confessional ROT article, “A Broadway Baby” on 22 September 2010), but I left with a broad smile on my face and nice, warm feeling in my gut. It is a feel-good show, after all. You see, even though I know now about all the turmoil and strife of the time, if I’m honest, back when I was 8, 9, 10 years old and listening to my radio and my 45’s, all I knew was that these people were making cool music for me—my music, our music, my friends, peers, and I. And, man, I loved it. I did then and I do now. I never thought of it this way—as I said, I’ve never been there—but I guess . . . Memphis lived in me.

Broadway Angel

By Kirk Woodward

[As my friend Kirk says, I’m “continually on the lookout for unusual aspects of the theatrical experience,” so when I heard that he and his wife had invested in a Broadway production, I asked if he’d consider writing about the experience of being a Broadway “angel.” Happily, he agreed and here’s the result: a description of what it’s like to be a small investor in a Broadway musical. This story even has a happy “ending” (it’s not really over, of course) because the show the Woodwards, veteran theater people but first-time angels, put their money into was Memphis, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical (as well as a few other categories) at the ceremony on 13 June, justifying the Woodwards’—and everyone else’s—commitment to the production. As the song says, “There’s no business like show business”! ~Rick]

As everyone knows, putting on a Broadway show is incredibly expensive. No matter how you try to contain costs, a Broadway musical will need several million dollars just to get it open, and once it’s playing in New York, it will continue to need pots of money in order to continue to run. Those operating costs are called the “nut,” and anything over the nut, if there is anything, goes toward paying off the show’s investors, hence the observation of my friend Dan Landon, house manager for one of the Shubert theaters, that “One dollar over the nut – it’s a hit!”

That saying is definitely true about a show in terms of how long it runs – under ordinary circumstances, as long as a show makes its nut it can stay on the boards. There are exceptions to this principle. Sometimes, for example, a producer wants to close a show even though it’s making money, perhaps in order to free a theater for a new (and presumably more profitable) show. But in general, as long as you meet your operating expenses, you can keep your show open.

Just because a show runs, however, doesn’t mean its original investors will make their money back. They may not, and of course they know it, or they ought to – most Broadway shows don’t turn out to be profitable, sometimes even at the end of a long run. Jekyll and Hyde is said to have lost its investment – in other words, not paid its investors back anything – even though it ran on Broadway for four years.

Nevertheless people keep investing in Broadway shows, on the principle, to borrow a remark from the playwright George Axelrod (who said it about playwrights), that on Broadway you can’t make a living, but you can make a killing. (Axelrod reversed the order.) I’ve met people who invested in Same Time, Next Year, and more recently in Jersey Boys. They are rolling in kale. And the odds of succeeding on Broadway may be better than the odds of winning the lottery . . . but not all that much better.

Decades ago a producer might put up his or her own money to bankroll a Broadway musical. (As Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II once wrote in the New York Times, "A great many producers 30 or 40 years ago used to invest their own money in their own shows. They all died broke.") Those days are gone forever. Nowadays producers are either corporations – the Shuberts, Disney – or massive lists of, basically, “angels” – people who put up money for a show. When a musical wins a Tony and the producers, a herd of them, come up to the stage to accept the award, most of those people didn’t do anything about producing the show at all, except to produce their wallets at the appointed time.

I write these words as a Broadway investor – a very small-scale investor, and, as you’ll see, not a terribly sensible one, but still . . . . To be precise, I didn’t actually invest in a Broadway show. Instead, I invested in a group of investors. The show is Memphis. It’s a fictionalized version of the beginning of the popularity of rock ’n’ roll, with a major theme of relations between the races. Memphis had four productions before it came to Broadway, at the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Massachusetts; at TheatreWorks in Mountain View, California; at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, California; and at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle, Washington.

Obviously a show with so many productions had something to offer – many theaters won’t touch a play that’s not a premiere, but three theaters picked up this one, not counting Broadway. Another way to put the situation is that the show had “buzz,” which is the noise I heard in my ear when at a party I asked a friend who works for a ticket sales agency what shows were stirring up the most advance interest. “There’s Memphis,” he said without hesitation. “I hear it’s great.”

By coincidence, the next week another acquaintance of ours sent around an email asking if anyone was interested in investing in – you guessed it – Memphis. Serendipity! This was the first time my wife, Pat, and I had ever had a chance to invest in a Broadway show of any sort. We discussed the opportunity, and agreed to look at the materials for the show, which at that point was close to beginning previews in New York. The investor group, as I said, was actually a sub-investor, intending to buy a share in the show itself. We would buy, then, a piece of an investment. Our money would be used for an advertising reserve.

Among the many reasons I was interested in becoming a Broadway backer, two stand out. One, of course, was the possibility of making money. It would be lovely to have Broadway provide some disposable income. Another and, I suspect, more important reason was the feeling that we’d be participating in the Broadway world – in a Broadway adventure. For people like us who’ve worked in theater for years, being part of the Broadway community, even in a small way, is a powerful emotional lure.

Obviously due diligence requires careful research on the show, so obviously that’s not what I did. Well, I did to a certain extent – I went on the show’s website, for example, and listened to parts of the score, and I liked it. On the other hand, I didn’t read the script (I don’t remember if it was available), and I didn’t really consider the fact that Memphis had no “big names” or film stars in it. I don’t recommend my procedure to anyone as a best practice. My way of selecting a show to invest in didn’t differ that much from horse players who pick a winner based on its name, and perhaps a tip from the guy at the newsstand. Be warned.

Nevertheless I persuaded Pat that we should make the investment, and we sent in a certain amount of money we weren’t sure we had. Pat made it clear that the responsibility for this decision, about as financially sound an idea as investing in a treasure hunt, lay entirely on my shoulders. But the die was cast, and we sent in our check, joining a mighty throng – the musical’s poster lists thirty-seven producers, both individual and corporate, and that doesn’t even begin to include sub-contributors like us.

We began to receive encouraging emails from our investment coordinator, and finally – glory be – an invitation to both Opening Night and the subsequent cast party. We’ve both been to opening nights before, but never to a Broadway cast party. This was beginning to look good.

The show opened, after previews, at the Shubert Theater on October 19, 2009. We didn’t hire a limo to take us to opening night – we’d spent enough money on the show already – but we did get there early and wandered around, feeling very connected. The show was excellent and well received, as it should have been, considering how many seats must have been filled by investors like ourselves. At intermission I talked with a few people connected with the show, including its producers in Seattle. Nowadays, even though newspaper and TV reviews typically appear following opening night, those reviewers actually see a show at an earlier preview performance rather than at the official opening, so there was no worry about how this particular performance had gone. But it did go well.

Then off to the cast party, at the Hard Rock Café on 42nd Street. You undoubtedly have images of Broadway cast parties, with the breathless entrance of the person who’s snagged the first copy of the New York Times. Alas, there must have been eight hundred people at this cast party, all screaming at the tops of their lungs over a background of rock music, and that breathless entrance wouldn’t have been noticed if the person were carrying a stack of copies of the paper a mile high. That, my friends, is a lot of producers.

We milled around a while, trying not to be suffocated while we looked, fruitlessly, for the table assigned to our investment group, whose name we weren’t sure of anyway. Finally, hunting for breathing room, we located a clearing which happened to be near the press area, and saw the only celebrities we identified the entire evening – the entire lineup of Bon Jovi, whose keyboard player, David Bryan, had written the score (lyrics with Joe DiPietro). The band looked relaxed and happy, and they posed for numerous pictures. We watched this cheerful spectacle for a while, and then we went home.

The next morning we had the excitement of bringing in the New York Times from the lawn and reading our review – and damn it, it wasn’t good at all. We were, what’s the word for it, crushed. Also we felt a lot poorer than we had the night before, our wallets a great deal lighter. I look at several papers in the course of the day, and the other reviews I read were quite good. But the Times is terribly important to the success of a Broadway show, and all in all, October 20, 2009, was not a happy day. In addition, adding insult to injury, several days later my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, didn’t like the show much either.

Well, theater is a matter of continuing ups and downs. A few days later we got a package in the mail, containing the following: a Memphis souvenir worth displaying on the family room mantle; a poster of the show signed by the whole cast; and a letter explaining that, while the Times hadn’t liked the show much, most of the rest of the reviews were terrific, and that a well thought-out and creative advertising campaign (that’s where our money went, remember!) would eliminate the effect of the review in a short time, and the show seemed likely to have an excellent run.

That was almost exactly eight months ago as I write this account, and since that day I haven’t heard a word about how our money is doing, except that for income tax purposes I received a form of about eight pages, which I passed on to our preparer without my understanding a word of it, except that it definitely didn’t say we’d made any money yet.

But there was, of course, one more event worth mentioning. The Tony Awards were presented on Sunday night, June 13, 2010. The Times, true to its nature, had seemed to us to try its hardest to promote Fela for Best Musical, but there are limits even to the power of the Grey Lady. My wife and I were barely even paying attention to the Tony broadcast when the winner was announced. I heard a scream from the next room – that was Pat - and ran in to see on TV – yes – a crowd of producers on stage, yelling like soccer fans and bouncing up and down while their designated spokesperson reported how delighted they all were.

So were we. I was happy, of course, because since I was mostly responsible for our decision to invest in the first place, now we had official ratification that the decision had been a good one. I was also happy because both Pat and I have worked in theater for years, and now we had a Tony! Truly the Lord works in mysterious ways.

I suppose the last paragraph of this piece shouldn’t be written until, months or years or decades from now, we receive a final accounting on our investment. There will be a national tour of Memphis in 2011, I’ve read, and after a while the rights to the show will be made available to amateur groups, who should have quite a good time with it. But in a way, all that is just bookkeeping. We became Broadway investors! We helped a show reach Broadway and stay there, at least for a while! We invested in a show we were proud of! And we got a piece of a Tony Award, even if we’re the only ones who know about it. All in all, not a bad eight months. Theater can always surprise you.